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Absolute Calibration Part 1 - part 3 of 1 2 3

by Mike McNamee Published 01/06/2002

(Start>Settings>Control Panel>Display>

Settings>Advanced>Color management>Set As Default). The options open to you depend on the operating system, Windows versions each differ; the Mac is simpler all round, you put it in the ColorSync Folder. Our version of the Heidelberg "ViewOpen" made profiles which are not compatible with Adobe products and could not be used except with CorelDRAW.

In PhotoShop you can see your newly installed Monitor Profile under Color Settings. It is located above the default RGB options within its own double lines on the grey background.

The results we obtained with the monitor in our studio were interesting. Despite claiming a gamma of 2.2 we had been working on an actual gamma of 2.9. We had suspected as much as we had noticed that images from a calibrated environment were darker than they should have been. The X-Rite Monitor Optimser measured our high gamma and the corrected it to within 1/100th of the desired value of 2.2. As you would expect, our screen was by now significantly brighter, and (importantly) now looked identical to other calibrated monitors. Calibrated output from Epsilon and Pictrograph printers also looked very close to the soft proofed PhotoShop versions.

CONCLUSIONS

There is no doubt that having a calibrated and measured monitor performance is both a great benefit and comfort.

Once you can point to the calibration data or show your client a calibration certificate you can speak with authority, knowing that your screen version is OK. This removes any argument when a client claims that their screen version looks different. It is still a slightly imperfect world, this viewing of colour, but it should be a little closer to harmony across organisations or photographer-client boundaries.

Next issue we will look at how close the printed output can get to the intended colour values.

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1st Published 01/06/2002
last update 09/12/2022 14:50:44

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